NeoFolio Notes

I've actually drawn a bunch more of the Fiend Folio do-overs but the drawings aren't near my scanner at the moment. However, for the sake of stocking my own dungeons I'm going to just list off all the changes I've made or am planning to make to the Fiend Folio monsters now. Hopefully I'll get around to scanning and drawing them later.

Mantari: A sort of fat land-crawling (not flying, not swimming) giant manta. Elephantlike skin.

Meazel: A meazel is the result of a kind of disease transmitted by a certain kind of goblin, it turns one of your fingers into a demonic biting monster.

Meenlock: I drew this and can't remember. I think it was some kind of psychedelic vertigo-inducing giant-head monster.

Mephit: original Folio text: "...they will wear clothes of the most garish design and color possible." Kinda like an evil leprechaun with funny hats, smoking pipes, looking like a demonic Mad Hatter.

Mezzodaemon: Oh I made some disturbing thing for this. Can't remember.

Mite: Can't remember.

Necrophidius: Left it alone, just redrew it.

Needleman: Did it as a humanoid with narrow 20-40-foot bent-back legs terminating in needles.

Nilbog: Largely as-is, but as a sort of goblin-magic-created champion.

Nonafel/cat o' nine tails: nine panthers with one (sentient?) brain. A schemer.

Norker: can't remember

Nycademon: can't remember

Ogrillon: can't remember

Osquip: Ecologically the same, only it's got no real head and a four-way flowerlike opening where the head should be like the Predator's mouth.

Penanngalan: Like a Vargouille but it doesn't fly, it walks using its entrails and casts spells as a witch.

Pernicon: It's like the Caterpillar in Alice but doesn't speak. Just gestures, offers tea. etc.

Phantom stalker: It actually stalks phantoms. A witch hunter or cleric that has undergone necessary rituals to be able to directly touch the undead. makes them nuts.

Poltergeist: as-is.

Protein polymorph: fuck this thing. ok, fine. A Protean is a giant-sized monster that's been verrrrry slowly turning from one thing to another over the course of 200 years. It'll be in some half-state. or half-made by the gods.

Quaggoth: No, "Othuagg". Like those long-nosed Guinea Babboons but goblins take them and dye them and drug them and make their hair and spike them up like John Blanche's Brat Gang pics from the original Confrontation 40k game and send them to kill you.

Quipper: You know those fairy tails where someone catches a fish and it asks them riddles or whatever? That's a quipper.

Qullan: Kinda like the original, only all female and Amazon and crossed with Mulan.

Retriever: It's the size of a normal spider. It crawls into your ear and whispers to you that you need to come with it to hell.

Revenant: A Kafka-esque soulless husk of a person--performs duties it had in life anyway.

Rothe: It's a mopey livestock creature that's sat in the same place so long that lichen and mold has grown on its back and the mold's gained intelligence and they have culture and whatnot.

Sandman: Basically the same. Only they wear clothes and disguise themselves.

Scarecrow: Better picture.

Screaming devilkin: its a gargoyle that's stuck in one place like the carved ones at Notre Dame. otherwise the same.

Shadow demon: "Demon's shadow"--if properly severed, at the right moment, a demon's shadow can be a useful servant or a terrfying opponent.

Sheet ghoul/phantom. Burying someone in a sheet that certain acts have been performed upon brings them back undead.

Skeleton warrior: like a regular skeleton but covered in mystic clay that makes it look like a human at first, the clay is carved with runes and shit and dyed in blood, slowly strips away as the champion takes damage.

Skulk: kinda the same, obscurely depressing.

Slaads: pretty much the same. at war with the chasme.

Snyad: "Dyad" Siamese twin goblin warriors, sometimes strapped into the center of giant spikey gyroscope-like spheres and rolled toward foes.

Son of Kyuss: This is a tiny lich made from a child prodigy evil cleric.

Stunjelly: you slather it on you and then attack. if you're nuts.

Sussurus: it is more abstract, and it can be bent into specific shapes to enunciate specific spells by powerful druids. kinda like the thing in Death Frost Doom.

Svnirflebenfm or whatever: the deep gnomes are just emaciated dwarves who have stared too long into he secrets of the earth. become totally insane, primitive, obsessed with lovecraftiana. bad earth magic.

Symbiotic jelly. It's just a sort of alien goo that gets on monsters and parasitizes them and makes them hungry. Makes creatures tougher and more hostile. also acts as stunjelly. stunjelly is actually dead symbiotic jelly.

Tabaxi: "Baxat" is what while-leopard men call themselves.

Tentamort: I love you just the way you are.

Terithran: another goblin weapon of war: weak, cursed goblins shoved or thrown across battlefields by their fellows whose touch causes specific terrible effects (cause light wounds, etc.)

Thoqqua: It resembles a very large tongue.

Thork: A trap laid by the redone aaracockra. looks like a stork but is full of scalding water.

Throat leech: a circular, toothed leechmouth appears on the victim's neck. makes it hard to eat and talks. like "the man who taught his asshole to talk"

Tiger fly: goblin bioweapon-- so-called because their bite marks foes with stripes--identifying them as enemies of this or that tribe of goblinkind.

Tirapheg: basically the same, improve the mechanics a little.

Trillloch: goblin espionge tool: Takes the form of a human woman who urges her husband to kill political rivals and their wives. The trilloch then eats the dead wife and changes to look like the dead wife, then urges the wife to kill various rivals, on and on forever etc.

giant troll, giant 2-headed troll, ice troll, spirit troll: these trolls are ordinary but insane trolls obsessed with pointlessly vexing the entity in question. a two-headed troll is a troll obsessed with bothering a pair of heads. a spirit troll seeks to depress people, etc.

Tween: A "Between". Takes the form of an ordinary animal. Often a black cat. Transfers bonuses from a PC's companions to him/her. A divisive opportunist hoping for murder.

Umpleby: an imp that preys upon small-time politicians. explains things to him about how things should go. greedy.

Urchin: "Emperor urchins" 15' in diameter. They roll across desert. Like Baron harkonnen crossed with a spiny ball. They roll and threaten.

Vision: a hallucination but the more creatures that believe it the realer it becomes. more and more hp.

Vodyanoi: Like an emperor urchin but it lives in rusty water and is made of rust.

Volt: a squat steampunk golem that delivers a jolt.

Vortex: another steampunk device--interlinking ring device with hula hoop-sized hole in the center, sucks you in.

Whipweed: tentacles that grow like long grass in huge vast plains.

Witherstench: just a "wither"--a bent, gruesome skunkperson

Witherweed: or Witchgrass. Its the stuff surrounding the witch on the cover of the first Sabbath album. touching it causes things to decay faster, burning it release the spirits beneath.

Xill: similar, but alien, not ethereal. and no legs.

Xvart: they are to goblins what Dwarven Trollslayers are to WFRP. Fanatical, dyed maniacs. Dyed blue.

Yellow musk creeper and its associated zombie: "Violet Leopard Orchid and Leopard Orchid zombie"
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ADDENDUM:

More encyclopedic monster goodness:

-Someone has decided to few the whole Manual from Pants this is a Catoblepas...
-Then there's this classic.
-And if you've got 18 minutes to download something, check this monster out.

Fiend Folio Fix: Magnesium Spirit

Another Fiend Folio do-over...

The original version of the Magnesium Spirit is one of a whole dull batch of unillustrated (or under-illustrated) things-that-have-one-exotic-attack-and-then-try-to-possess-your-body monsters in there.

My version here (sorry the bottom bit's blurry 'cause of the scanner fucking up) is a sort of alchemical semiundead. It looks like a sort of awkward, wavery version of a person at first. However, then the upper half of its body explodes in a burst of blinding light (save vs whatever or be blinded) and this flash then throws shadows on the walls or other surfaces nearby.

If the flash of light should happen to hit any living thing, its shadow will turn into a shadow with abilities and hit dice commensurate to the size of the cast shadow itself (in most cases this will be limited by the size of the room.) Outside in mist, the creature's flash will create Brocken spectres--which behave as wraiths.
As these shadows attack, the Spirit itself will attempt to gnaw at the target(s) in order to consume the magnesium in their bones. Its physical attack is relatively feeble--however, after 4 rounds it will regenerate its upper body and be able to generate another flash.

Lava Children, Lizard King Re-Done

BRIEF INTERMISSION: In regards to the most recent barrel of fun here on the blogs: people so upset about Raggi and Goodman's games they just can't stop talking about them I hereby issue this special, Cherry-Dr-Pepper-drinking...
The dudes are crying all the way to the bank. Aaaaanyway: Let's talk about Fiend Folio monsters instead.

So: for the L's---already did the Lamia, Noble. That leaves the Lava Children and the Lizard King.

Lava Children

...need no work. Babies made of lava are white-knuckle disturbing and creepy, largely because babies not made of lava are white-knuckle disturbing and creepy. They were left out of later editions because of some weird objection on the part of post AD&D TSR and WOTC to the idea of playing games where you kill children.

Anyway, the solution is obvious: use Lava Children anyway, just play this song while you do it. (Or this one.)

Jeff Rients turned them into little baby Buddhas which you kill, which just go to prove he's more blasphemous and Cannibal Corpsey than everybody else in DIY D&D put together.
Anyway click to enlarge as usual...

Now we got the Lizard King who's the kind of monster I hate. Why couldn't have just been included in the Lizard Man entry as like a leader? Because he's got a special trident plus something. Yawn. It only works for the Lizard King but no PC will ever find this out because tridents are dumb.

Anyway, I made a commitment to find a way to use everybody in the Folio, so I had to figure out how to make the Lizard King not just a bigger lizard man so I made him a sort of frilled lizard guy. Which I like a lot and which idea was I realized as soon as I finished painting it, stolen from the Palladium TMNT "Mutants Down Under" supplement but whatever. Here's the guy...Artheads: If you're wondering, these were done with first an acrylic wash over unprimed paper (red for the lava kid, obviously, black for Jim Morrison there) then I went back and painted over the wash in black while it was still wet so little particles of black dots get into the paint and make those charcoaly fades. In the case of the Lizard King I then went and painted in a white background after. The Lava Kid's about an inch tall, the Lizard King's a little bigger...

Less Lamia, Noble

Still redoing the Fiend Folio...

The Lamia, Noble is just a souped up version of the D&D lamia--which sucked. I'll repost what I already said...


Sources are conflicted about what exactly a lamia looks like, so they're no help, and for the most part it just seems like a succubus-lite. Many versions have a snake tail, which is cool, but 30 other women in the Manual have a snake tail, so whatever.

The original Greek is extremely good, though--Lamia was a queen who ate children and had the ability to pull her own eyes out and make prophecies. That's where I'd go with it...
That's acrylic on paper.

Got big plans for the other L's so I'll do them later...

Fiend Folio Fixes: K

Still trucking through the Fiend Folio and redecorating...

A Kamadan is what you get when you take a displacer beast and you replace the panther part with a leopard and the tentacles with some snakes. Why would you do that? Why would anyone do that? Just be impressed with yourself that you got an idea as harebrained as a tentacled puma with built-in stealth technology to actually kind of work and move on, crazy lily-gilding geneticist/wizards.

So, anyway I took the snake thing and leopard thing and did this...
...which I like a lot but really this is just another one of those lazy, heart-of-darkness-dwelling creepy-wisdom-dispensing you-come-to-me Colonel-Kurtz monsters because seriously no way is that thing chasing anybody except maybe in some Mayan carving and/or DMT trip.

Kelpie is a dumb name for anything that isn't a Korean novelty dessert but the basic idea of some creepy seaweed-maiden that goes all hagged and horrid and Room-237-scene-from-the-Shining on you is fine.
Kenku: a bird guy. I have already cracked wise on the Friar Tuck budgie-man Kenku in the Folio. He is hereby replaced. What is scary about birds is the clockwork vapidity of their eyes. Give the bird personality--as they did in the original picture--and it all goes awry.
The Khargra (a kind of fish/xorn from the Earth Elemental dimension) is a monster that I have never ever heard anybody talk about ever, despite the fact that it has a pleasingly freakshow picture......and is just weirdstupid enough that someone, somewhere might actually take a shine to it. That someone is not me. Much as I would like to see it fight a sharkticon, a fish that flies or tunnels (I refuse to look it up) through walls is just not what I need in my D&D game. I have decided Khargra is instead a weird Xorn god that is sort of, to the Xorn, what Charon is to us, and sort of greets them or otherwise facilitates their visits to our Prime Material Plane. Because I do need that. I guess. Hey, I said I was going to do every monster, right?
The Kilmoulis is the Fiend Folio's dumb elephant-nosed version of a species of Irish or Scottish or English brownie or fairy or whatever that--hey guess what?-is mischievous and/or sometimes helpful. The only thing that really distinguishes it from the entire rest of the Midsummer Nights Dream posse is it hangs out in mills. Which, as monster-distinguishing-characteristics goes, is not exactly up there on the excite-o-meter with snakes-for-hair. This sort of thing is all fine and good if you're thinking up tonguetwisty names of things to keep kids from tromping the dales or romping off the ockle or whatever it is bad children do on the other side of the Atlantic but if I'm going to give something stats I need to have something more to go on.

So anyway, this is Kilmoulis. He appears one morning where one of your thumbs should be and does his evil bad-fairy stuff from there.
Kuo-Toa: Yeah yeah, I know "Shadow Over Innsmouth", Module D2, blah blah I hate them anyway on account of they look like footballs with fins in diapers. Fuck them. Lovecraft's Deep Ones were disturbing because they were genetically mixed in with regular people and that was gross but these guys are just one more grunty humanoid race. Plus they wear sandals, which is entirely unacceptable.

Basically when I need bipedial icthyoids, I'm going to use the fishwife. Illustrated below is the fishgroom, which is what you become if you marry one.

Fiend Folio J-Corps + Some Session Notes

Despite the fact that the Vornheim contest is at this very moment, in progress, I am still in the process of redoing the Fiend Folio. The J's are a quiet neighborhood, only 2 monsters: Jaculi and Jermlaine. The Jaculi is profoundly Ok, I guess. It's a sort of leaping snake with decent paleocryptozoological cred. It's just, well, hey one more snake-monster. But then since snakes are books then an expedition to the Viridian Jungles to hunt the rare javelin snake for its enlightening flesh is an ok thing to have to do, I suppose. I added little feet things to make the launching-itself-from-trees thing more convincing. The original Jermlaines--little mousemen--look, to be charitable, like melted coneheads. Or, to be accurate, like naked pinhead people. The nicest thing you can say about the later versions is that they made them look less like pinheaded people, but still not less pinheaded. So I just ignored all that. Ok, so they're mouse people. There's nothing wrong with mouse people--Fritz Leiber had mouse people. Warhammer has rat people. D&D already has wererats. The big difference between mice and rats is personality. Mice are cute. Ok, so this guy came out looking like a Mouse Guard mouse, or Desperaux. So the local difference between wererats and jermlaines will be that wererats are as big as people and you feel good about killing them and jermalines are little innnocent wee folk and you feel really bad about killing them. _____________ Notes from Day One on The Isle of Oth: -So after sailing across the sea the PCs finally land on the mysterious Isle of Oth (motive? "I wonder what's on the Isle of Oth?""Yeah, let's go there.") and they are greeted by soldiers who think Connie is their boss. Actually Connie's long lost sister is their boss. They look alike. -Then, because this is always how it goes, the next session Connie couldn't be there. So the whole talking-to-your-long-lost-sister business is pushed to the wayside. -Luckily, the Isle of Oth is a sort of insane urbanized semi-democratic teratocracy generated this way and the PCs quickly get caught up in inter-monster politics. -I remembered, after the fact, that I have 50-odd random "things NPCs want from other characters" cards which I made up and really oughtta use next time. Ever make game stuff and forget you made it a month later? -Mandy's snake-cleric got fucked the fuck up by some new, improved hook horrors and so abandoned her faith, switched religions and got busted back down to first level but now with weird witch-powers, courtesy of her new mistress (for a year-and-a-day) Germanotta. -Satine rolled a new character. Following my "go through enough dead normal characters and you can start creeping into the exotic races" rule, she's a snow-leopardperson. -New method for improvising encounters: just have a picture of every single monster or person in the environment on the laptop desktop. Faster than having a list since seeing is faster than reading. Categorize by monster type next time? Maybe.

WhyIsThereNoDeadSpaceInVornheim? + More Fiend Folio

Consider the following 3 Fiend Folio do-overs for monsters beginning with the letter "I" a Joesky's rule payment for the stuff in red at the end.

The original Fiend Folio ice lizard is just a baby white dragon. Which you don't need since you can just make a baby white dragon. I made it into a sort of komodo dragon that can walk on water by freezing the surfaces it touches.
The original Imorph is not plastic-surgery software from microsoft, it's a sort of changeling that slowly copies you in combat. Which would be clever if there wasn't already the enveloper and changeling. So this one imitates everybody in the area simultaneously:As should be clear from my picture, while waiting to strike, it hides on the bottom of skateboard decks from the early 1980s.

And, finally, The Iron Cobra needs neither introduction nor renovation:
And now, I talk about to some people about graphic design:

_____
Hey layout nerds: You know why there's no empty space in Vornheim? Because then you can fit more stuff in. You know why everything else you don't like? Because I do like it.

I didn't write it for The Public, I wrote it for me so I could use it and so people as smart as me could use it. If LOTFP calls me up and says "Hey, even though this book is our best-seller, I feel we could be making more money if we could sell it to dumb people used to reading Wired instead of novels who can't see letters when they're near other letters, so let's change it", then I just hang up the phone and Mandy and Viv can just cam for 15 minutes and we make all that money we just lost back.

This isn't my job or how I earn a living, so, paradoxically, I have the unusual freedom to make something good rather than full of WhatAGraphicDesignTextbookTellsUsMakesTheMajorityOfConsumersWantToBuyABook. If I'm lucky enough to have that freedom, why not use it?

Everybody in this cash-starved niche has had to sit through endless bullshit and bloat and bad taste because commercial pressure forced this, that and the otherfuck on products, designers rules, magazines, artists, and whole companies. In Vornheim, you at least have the comfort of knowing that the only reason you're sitting through anything is because it worked better that way for the actual human being who wrote it. Vornheim is only as stupid as I am, not as stupid as the average graphic designer thinks the average consumer is. Be happy for that small favor, if nothing else.

I'd rather make a gorgeous little book that I like that works and that (because it all fits in 64 pages) you can get at a reasonable price than "grow the hobby". Or do what some guy in emo glasses tells me will grow the hobby.

Fixing The Fiend Folio--Department H

H in the Fiend Folio is for "Ha ha! You bought this book? Choad." No flail snail or githyanki to raise the curtain of gloom. Just some dumb animals and a dead guy. Let's tackle it...

The main thing you'll notice about the Hellcat other than it's indistingushability from other cat monsters is it's size L. I figure: Hell is inside these cats. You have to crawl into their hellmouths to get there.
The hoar fox has one of those names like Jonson the Hammer that probably sounded real flash in 1292 but now just sounds like some troglodyte troll blogger's attempt at a bad pun. Not a bad monster though--icy fox monster. Sure, why not? To distinguish it mechanically from a winter wolf and things like that I feel like it needs a better thing than frost breath, though.
(The scale is goofy: little animal, big cone of cold. Too Looney Tunes.) Starting with how that guy said a fox hunt is supposed to be "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible" let's say the White Fox tricks polar bears and giant lynxes and other polar megafauna into eating it. These animals then freeze to death from the inside out because of the iciness of the fox, and then the clever fox eats them. Suck it, borealan apex predators.

The Hook Horror?
I think they meant to call it the Hook Fucking Seriously Fucking Really Why? Fuck You We're Not Trying. Like idiots, they keep using it even now:
Not only have they made hook horror minis, they have made more than one kind of hook horror mini. And I still can't get a flail snail mini. And Jeffrey C. Jones is dead and Grover Norquist is alive. ANYWAY, here--I will show you horror in a handful of hooks:
The secret horror technique I have ingeniously employed here is to not make the monster look like the fucking buzzard from Woody Woodpecker.

Necromancers take note: How you make a hook horror is you tie up a victim, dip them in various hermetic herbs and spices, replace his or her hands with hooks, hang him or her by said hooks, and leave them like that for a million years. Then they slowly stretch out, then you re-animate them and voila: a horror.

Now the Hornet, Giant...I have a scale issue with giant flying bugs. Somehow those papery wings all gigantic and flapping at helicopter speed just doesn't work for me. Maybe it just seems too technological. Or too Ferngully. Anyway, new crawly giant hornet:The Hound of Ill Omen is another goddamn dog monster, though, to be fair, it just shows up and portends doom and leaves, so it's not just another demon dog/hellhound/barghest. The mechanics could be handled better than in the Folio, plus it doesn't give a compelling reason the hound is there in the first place, but this is all doable: tie the appearance of the hound to the PC actually doing something and tie the doom power to an ill fate. I -no plug intended but it's unavoidable here- suggest using a variant on the Fortune system in Vornheim for the dog's curse.

As for the Hound itself, it should definitely look more fucked than the one in the Folio...
Now the Huecuva as presented in the Folio is just Another Fucking Skeleton. But thanks to this Dragonsfoot thread I know it's supposed to be some kind of MesoAmerican monster. Which is fine because there aren't really many good D&D monsters in this semiTecumelian vein. So I sent it to Pre-Columbian Ecuador for some redesign work...
...as for mechanics, it'll need something better than just "hey, maybe you got a disease". I'm thinking a curse where every time you kill something it comes back to life as a zombie and keeps trying to kill you and you can only stop it by destroying the huecuva.

Fiend Folio Do-Over: G

The G's in the Folio are really really depressing. The ideas are bad, the names are worse...oh I need a doctor...not even "flumph" funnybad but more like "oh-I-don't-remember-that-one-huh-oh-well-go-back-to-my-knitting" bad but, hey, we're making lemonade here. (clicking these will generally enlarge them far beyond the original size they were drawn at.)

So, the G's, renovated...

The Galltrit is a little generic gremlin that flies up to you, drains your blood, and flies away, often undetected. It's just a very dull form of GM fiat with stats. I re-did it as this guy who creates an artificial center of gravity (kinda strong) in the room and is called a Gauntlet. It usually appears in the midst of other monsters and is fairly inactive, but any hit not directed at it is likely to get pulled toward it slightly and therefore miss. Missiles at -6, melee at -4, dropped items always hit the Gauntlet (who usually then eats them).

Oh, the Gambado...shoot me and eat my eyes, it's so lame. And the name is lame. It's a skull that's actually a springy jack-in-the-box only no box just the ground. It's so fucked. I re-did it as a thing called an Inhabiter, it's a small demon with oracular abilities and hermit-crab-like habits only instead of using shells it uses heads.
Garbug. Garbug? Fuck you Fiend Folio "G" authors. Galltrit, Gambado, Garbug? Oh no! The Garbug! Fear it! Fuck. Goddam egg-sucking soccer hooligan waterheads wrote this thing. Anyway: half bug! half lobster! The black variety does something lame and the violet variety does something also lame.It is now called a Gurgler and it's a foot long and it's like a little Igor and it helps evil wizards and alchemists carry out experiments by like taking measurements and handing them shit. "Clawing" I guess. Its unique attack is if you put a substance into the glass jar fused to its back then its saliva can replicate the effects of said substance.
Giant, Fog and Giant, Mountain are lazy re-treads of the already-suspicious Giant, Cloud and Giant, Hill, respectively. A giant is a giant, ok? That's pretty exciting right there. If you want to get fancy with the concept you need to do a lot better than say "And it lives in Colorado!"

So: Fog Giant...Mountain Giant...I'll be the first to admit the Mountain Giant looks like a big Galeb Duhr but there's only so much that can be done with these "G" Fiends.

Giant strider. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Fire-breathing repti...oh, you have. Ok, new giant strider:Gibberling these are like some grubby humanoids with some hit dice and stuff. They make some noises, I guess, which is supposed to make me forget I need more gross subhumans with clubs like I need a hole in my...AAAAH! I'm doing it too, the cliches the CLICHES!!!! fuck. My brain. Ok, calm...The Gibberling is now this:It is an intelligent relative of the Shrieker, it speaks most local languages, is saprophytic and telepathic. It reads the PCs thought and--rather than shrieking--simply tells passing monsters everything it knows about the PCs so that they'll kill them and the gibberling can eat their rotting flesh. Occasionally a gibberling can be convinced by PCs to give them info on monsters so, y'know, vice versa...

Githyanki. I am so happy there's a semi-decent monster here I'm gonna not talk about how lame some of the mechanics associated with them are...Their less-interesting-cousins the Githzerai need a redesign. They're supposed to be kind of like monks, ok...The goldbug is a poison bug that looks like a coin. Let's make it a bug that eats coins.....or we could make a version of it that's inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story and make it a bug that's really fucking racist.

Gorbel. Fuck. Fuuuuck. Jesus fucking fuck on a fuck. It grabs and won't let you go. Also, it is a sphere. With 3 eyestalks. And little grabby claws. How I yearn for the green grass of home...What am I on about? That made as little sense as this monster. Ok. It's now a Grasping One and it does the same thing--grabs and won't let go, only it does so over your face. And it has a face:Gorillabear. I lack the energies of disgust the gorillabear deserves here. I'm calling it Grendel and redrawing it slightly and moving on...The Grell just needs its stupid beak removed:Now the Grimlock. The original grimlocks were indistinguishable from gibberlings only quieter and blind. They should never have been invented. However, the word "grimlock" is good. Here's a new one:The original Gryph is just a crow with a lot of legs with a laying-eggs-in-you trick stolen from Alien and the giant bluebottle fly in this very folio. Reeeeeplaced:It's hard to argue with the concept of Guardian Demon though the mechanics they give it are some dumb fire powers. Here's a new picture, the rest I bet you can handle. It asks riddles or curses you or makes your entrails try to crawl out of your nose or something:Last up we got the Guardian Familiar which (good news) is a cat with nine lives, each a hit die scarier than the last, but which (bad news) is just a cat, really. I decided that each cat is inside one of those Russian dolls and inside each cat is another Russian doll with another cat in it.

The Flail Snail and the Flumph Are The Good News...

I am keeping on with the Fiend Folio makeovers.

Up to "F"...

The original firdrake is pure monsterbloat. A little red dragon for a game that has baby red dragons and fire lizards already. So making it any kind of lizard is off the table. And taking the "drake" part literally and making it a kind of kind of duck is better left to DMs gonzo-er than I. I figure "firedrake" is a decent Vancian name for a mysterious fiery entity. The spark crawled and spun, pooling and pulling shapes from itself until it wore the familiar grin and curled talon of a firedrake...

So: if you cast a fireball and roll all 1's for damage, it becomes a firedrake, which is a mischievous sort of fire elemental that attacks the nearest flammable thing then jumps to the next flammable thing and the next and the next for a half an hour before fading out of existence...The only nice bit in the original firedrake entry is that the breath weapon is made of the lizard's own boiling blood. I'm going to say goblins use tame firedrakes to acidify and weaponize the blood of small animals. More on that later.

Firenewts are exactly like lizardmen but they breath fire. Which is really a great trick since it makes both lizardmen and dragons less unique and fun. This firenewt......is about 4 inches tall and will demand strong drink or the answer to a riddle. Failure to provide one or the other will cause some small part of the interlocutor's body to burst into flame.

More blatant firebloat: firesnake and firetoad. For every scary thing in D&D there is a snake version of that thing and, on a 4-6, a toad version of that thing. There is little I can do with the word, concept, or picture of "firesnake" or "firetoad" to make them not just what they are. Here's my best shot...
Here we have the firesnakeball, a weapons goblins make by feeding firedrakes to snakes. The flaming wad is then pitched forward at PCs in a coiling, burning wad which smacks some unlucky joe and then separates and crawls all over them just before the goblins themselves roll up and fight. Because goblins think arrows are boring.
The firetoad is also a goblin thing but it's more a sneaky weapon like a caltrop. They're like the size of poison arrow frogs and you step on them and then that sucks because their blood burns you.

In majestic contrast to all this fire_____ bullshit, the flail snail is a perfect and unimprovable monster.
Also, I am so happy about how my flail snail picture came out that I am going to post it twice. In the "what-it-looks-like-printed-after-you-photograph-it" version above and in the "what-it-looks-like-if-you-turn-the-contrast-down-so-you-can-see-all-the-little-pen-lines" version.This makes me think about the whole your-best-art-is-the-art-that's-about-the-things-you-care-about-most axiom. Hey, maybe. Second thing: OTHERWORLD! I am still willing to trade belladonna's home phone number for a flail snail mini. Get in touch, ok?

So anyway fuck the Flind. Way ahead of even "booka" and "bunyip" in competition for most malphonic word in the folio. Sounds like you're vomiting with a lisp. Flind. And so bloaty: a gnoll, only a little bigger and with a chainy weapon that would reappear in Oriental Adventures. So, the makeover: they are guignolls and they are alchemically-fucked up gnoll berserkers with prosthetic body parts. Exhibit A here has a chain with a guy's head on the end instead of an arm but each guignoll is unique. The rest of the gnolls treat these guys as sacred gladiators. Now people love to hate the flumph...
...but whatever, stupid beats boring any day, the raw material here is nowhere near as hopeless as the flind or the firesnake. Just turn it sideways...

...and, bam, perfectly serviceable* monster. Yeah, the name needs work..."Orth". Ok.

The Forlarren is unusual in being a tragic monster with a fairly compelling behavioral schtick: it longs to kill the PC and then feels just terrible about it once it succeeds. It has a kind of generic (but stylishly realized) Russ Nicholson bad-Puck picture, which can be fixed up by taking the redundant satyr-derived design elements out of it...
..and it has the rather unfairytalish power to heat metal up. Lets just say it'll make water boil. Including any water the PCs may be carrying. Or a whole lake, maybe.

At the end of "F" we got the frost man. Which is an eyepatchy kind of guy who can shoot a cone of frost from said patched void and who, in common with most cave-dwelling species, has extraordinarily poor taste in clothing. Anyway, I believe a writer far better than whoever invented the frost man (this guy?) could probably write a creepy short story where an entire race of men who all have eyepatches (but why do they...oh never mind...) and who shoot cones of frost from these desolate sockets and do creepy icy things or at least do a few things that don't just remind you of pirates and frosty cones and a million other things you'd rather think about than dumb eyepatch cavemen. I am not, tonight, that man. Today I am the man that drew a picture while trying to draw something else entirely of this guy...
...who I imagine is blue-skinned with white facial hair and who is 9 feet tall and who has a freezy touch and who stands waist-deep in arctic pools, demanding weird tolls from lone travellers.





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*Yes I see your pun and have chosen to ignore it.